Vienna Betrayal - Lila Dubois Page 0,53

tripping a backup system.

Based on her intel there wasn’t a backup system, but since that would be the height of stupidity, she was pretty sure there was a backup, and her sources just hadn’t been able to find out anything about it.

The better option was to break in the old fashioned way, by outsmarting the physical lock. It might have been controlled by the electronic keypad, but there was a physical mechanism that kept the door closed. She had some magnets, metal plates, and a slim jim all tucked away inside innocuous items from her luggage.

Alena looked at the pad again as she turned to leave, some instinct telling her not to give up.

How many times could the wrong code be entered before the alarm went off? People were fallible, so it was extremely rare that a system wouldn’t tolerate a few failed code entries.

Even if she could enter the wrong code ten, twenty, or one hundred times, it was still extremely unlikely that she’d get it by plugging in random numbers.

Six digits in the master code. A master code that only a few people, including Alexander knew.

Alexander.

She swallowed hard. All the manipulation and lies to get to this point, it had better be worth it. Alexander was both tender and harsh, precise and emotionally complex.

Precise. He was precise, and logical.

0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 10…no that was one digit too many.

Some long-buried knowledge from high school math was jumping up and down, trying to get her to pay attention.

Did the numbers double? One doubled was 2, but two doubled wasn’t three…but that idea worked for five and ten.

Not double, but add. Add the previous two numbers together.

And start at the bottom of the keypad, with 0.

Alena smiled slowly as the buried memory came into focus. Math rarely had projects, and she’d loved projects, that enjoyment a precursor to what she currently did.

The one project she did remember from math was plotting out a spiraled seashell, using the Fibonacci sequence.

A mathematical sequence in which each number was the sum of the two preceding numbers, starting with zero.

She slid on a glove and reached for the keypad.

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5

The light blinked once, then turned green.

Hot damn, that worked.

Grinning, Alena carefully brushed the fingerprint dust off the number pad, then put the flowers back in position.

A minute later, she gingerly opened the parlor door and slid inside.

Now, so close to her goal and high on the fact that she’d figured out the code without having to use any of her nifty toys, her heart was racing, her whole body humming with adrenaline.

She resisted the urge to whistle the theme song to various heist movies. After all, she was a professional.

Looking around at all the beautiful art, she took a moment to mourn the fact that she wasn’t here for a painting or sculpture.

In the far corner of the room, Alena knelt, then popped the barrel off of the blowdryer.

Using only the light spilling in through the windows, she chose a section of floor that had clearly been repaired. She objected, morally, to ruining some long ago artisan’s handiwork by drilling through hundred-year-old hand-laid parquet.

Alena set the drill bit on a seam of two rectangles of wood, and started to drill. The tool had been specially built to be quiet, but it wasn’t completely silent. If anyone was up and walking by the door, they’d hear.

If she was caught right now she was probably screwed, so she held her breath until the drill finally broke through the floor, and the ceiling of the room below.

Working quickly now, relying in part on muscle memory, she added the button camera to the end of the robotic laparoscopic arm, and slid it through the seven-millimeter hole. The feed from the camera appeared on her phone screen, which she propped up against the wall, looking at it, rather than her hands.

The temperature controlled server farm was illuminated by the lights on the racks of servers, red and blue pinpoints like a thousand regimented colored stars in the vast inky darkness of space. She worked the control and slowly rotated the head of the laparoscope, the camera feed shifting little by little.

The back of her neck was sweaty and it felt like ten minutes had passed before she located the cluster servers.

Luckily they weren’t far from where she’d made the hole in the ceiling.

When she withdrew the laparoscope to thread the fire-wire cable into the room below, a tiny stream of cool air caressed her